Actually, I was thinking about it, and if you used hundreds of those double 1x1 ended flexible tubes in an interlocking pattern, you could probably create a comfortable chair.
Re:What would have been TRULY fantastic...
on
The LEGO Desk
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· Score: 1
I think that you would find that the most difficult part of rendering an image with Lego would be color depth. Lego only come in a small range of colors, all very heavily saturated.
The only way you could conceivably do any dithering would be to use a scale so large that you could effectively mix the colors and confuse the eye with an optical illusion. You wouldn't be able to do that on the surface of a desk.
Your best bet would be to create, like he said on the site, a company logo or something similiar. Those tend to be mostly monochromatic (so that they can be used on a wide variety of applications, from brochures to embossed paper weights) and would allow easy transferance to Lego design.
One other thing. Lego does provide a number of differently colored bricks now, some that are transparent too. You could use the colored transparent bricks with a different color behind it to get a bit of a mix. The only problem with this is that these newer special color bricks are much MUCH more expensive and hard to get in quantity. The bricks you can get in quantity are your basic blue, red, yellow, green (not as common), white, and black.
You wish to see what images look like with those limitations? Remember CGA moniters?:)
I think that is what you are looking for. That'll print out freespace on all mounted disks in 'human readable' format.
I think the problem is you are used to the DOS environment where you must rely almost entirely upon the command line to do things. There are tons of tools on the *NIX side that do these things for you.
For instance, piping to 'sort' to tabulate any output, using 'sed' to format the output before printing using 'cat' to monitor/procs. It is a different philosophy, just like using X is a different philosophy from those 'other' GUIS. Since it is slapped on top of a true multi-tasker, you tend to place all of your small concise applications side by side instead of stacking monotlithic monsters on top of each other since you can't use them all at once anyway.
Those are the two things I see most people struggle with when migrating from mac/dos/win to linux. The need for a new philosophy both on the command line, and in X.
I was talking about the pads with arrow keys alone. The ones with mini-joysticks are better, but still not good. The mini-joysticks are too small and provide much less of a tactile feedback than mouse movement.
The same thing goes for standard joysticks on the PC. You won't find many good FPS players using a joystick. Why? You have full analog build-up sure! But you are still stuck with the upper-limit.
Technically a mouse DOES have an upper limit, but in practice you'll never find it. You'd have to move your hand faster than is humanly possible.
Obviously then, there is a much wider range of precision, and this precision is guided by a very menmonic -- the faster you move the faster the character moves -- feel. Sliding a joystick toggle over until it hits the edge and maxes out, really doesn't do this.
Indeed, there are merits to have the resolution set lower to provide greater accuracy. Don't underestimate the macro features built into most PC FPS games. My setup had two macros made, I bound them to the wheel on the mouse.
The macros basically did three things. If you pull the wheel towards you, it set the sensitivity to a low level, tells you that it did so, and binds two new macros to the mouse wheel. The two new ones are the next stage of settings. So in other words if you pull the wheel towards you again it will execute a macro that makes the mouse even slower, ect.
What is this good for? Take the TF Sniper, 3 clicks up...high sensativity 'dual mode'...run to an opening...4 clicks down...ultra-high precision...BAM...4 clicks up and run to a new spot.
You get the necessary sniper/railgun accuracy plus the high powered speed you need to dual. You have to get used to the sensativity shifting all of the time, that is a little weird at first.
Think about it this way. You turn mouse-look on which is practically a default in games now. This means you move the mouse to physically turn your viewpoint and angle of vision. With one calculated move you can spin your character 180 degrees around and 40 degrees down.
Most expert FPS players set their mouse resolution insanely high so that the slightest twitch moves the character quickly. This means minimal movement, a fraction of an inch, to accomplish gymnastic moves you simply CANNOT do with a device that provides upper-limit movement like arrow pads on consoles and arrow keys on keyboards. They both provide no analog feel to movement. You are either turning or you arn't. No fast turns, no slow turns except by controlled tapping which decreases your accuracy.
That is just mouse movement. I set up my keyboard bindings to provide compass movement. N S E W. There is no turning with the keyboard that is all handled with the mouse.
If you have dual input movement you can accomplish such feats as circle strafing, attacking your opponent while he is chasing you, midair snipes, ect.
You can always tell a one-input movement player because they can't effectively circle strafe. In other words, you can circle around them, always pointed at them, and fire at them. If you are fighting somebody that is using a gamepad or keyboard input only you can stay behind them and they can't do a thing about it.
The other advantages were brought up in another message. I have a five button mouse (wheel counts as three) I bind macros to the wheel such as firing off one missile and returning to the previous weapon. You can't even make or bind macros with a console.
On the keyboard I don't use the default 1-9 numbers for weapon selection. That is too slow because it requires moving my hand from the movement keys. So, I've bound three keys around the movement area for weapon macros that alternate between similiar weapons (nail gun, shot gun - supernail gun, double barrel - grenade launcher, rocket launcher) ect.
Everything else I need is bound right within that district so I never move my hands.
You simply cannot do this stuff with a console.
I had a friend that swore by keyboard input alone. He wouldn't use a mouse because it was too weird. He was a GOOD player with just the keyboard, but there were obvious limitations to what he could do. I finally converted him to dual input and he became one of the best Quake players I've ever seen.
A good point on the surface. However there are serious interface issues around taking away the keyboard input entirely. If the eventual outcome is to take it away you will seriously hurt the usability of these programs. Expecially Photoshop and their ilk. Consider the fact that people who use these programs for their career, it would be important to note that these users do not waste their time with palettes and menus unless there is no other option. When I use photoshop, I use it in full screen mode with all of the palettes off. I can switch layers, apply effects, change brushes, sizes, pressure, everything with one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse. It would take 10 times longer to do everything with a stylus because it would be completely dependent on a point-and-tap interface. Such usage is fine for the intermediate to beginning users who don't NEED to spend all of their time in these applications. For those who rely on them to bring in their paychecks, speed is everything, and the keyboard mappings mean speed. I used Photoshop as an example, which is ironic because incidentally it is the worst 'commercial standard' when it comes to keyboard support. Other programs are much more reliant on keyboard input and commands. Some can be completely reconfigured to accomdate any users needs. Another point is that this really isn't about graphics and design users either. The way I understand it, this will be applied to portable solutions. You'll be hard pressed to find a designer that uses a laptop instead of a desktop workstation with a 21" screen. The fact of the matter is this will be going onto portables for casual to professional users of conventional software SUCH AS word processing SUCH AS email. I don't know about you, but I can type at around 100 WPM on a good keyboard. I can write about 1/3 of that on a sheet of paper. Paper provides a tactile feel, and allows small strokes. Stylus typically has a smooth surface with no give, and requires large strokes to be recognized. This will slow that down to a crawl. This idea has cropped up in the past, and it has never flown exactly because of the reasons I gave above. For the 'power users' they need their keyboard mappings. For the casual users, they can still type faster than they can write. The one thing I do like about the stylus design is that you have an instant point-to-hit instead of a mouse or trackball where you must move-to-hit. That speeds up pointer-operations, but it tends to tire out your arm, expecially on a large enough stylus. What could be a 1 inch flick of the mouse, or a small twitch on a trackball means a huge 8-10" arm movement to reach the interface widget you are trying to hit. I don't see it flying, ever.
What's happened to you Sam? Records is a dead-end department. Information Retrieval is where it is at. And just look at this suit you are wearing, you'll never get anywhere in a suit like that. I'm perfectly happy where I'm at Jack. Don't you have any dreams Sam? Dreams? No, I don't have any dreams. I don't want anything Jack. SaaaaaAAAaaammmmmmm.
They would quickly amass a large quanity of these containers, floating around in orbit. It would take too long to get a program together to collect them and do something constructive with them. There is no feasible way to get them back to earth, and in the meantime they would really clutter up the orbit.
Not only that, but you are confusing the fact that what NASA does has nothing to do with what Collective Human Stupidity is capabile of doing. A small group of humans can be quite rational about the preservation of our ecosystem, and the checks and balances there. But collective humanity as a whole is quite greedy and not really ready to think on the long term scale yet. Sad but true.
One thing that has always baffled me is the public's fascination with celebs. I suppose it is somewhat easy to fathom why this is so, in a psychological/sociological sense. I personally do not relate to it however. The types of people who tend to frequent boards such as this are not as fascinated with Brad Pitt and John Stamos, but rather they are fascinated with incredible scientists, technologists, and 'people ahead of their time'.
I am not saying that such a fascination is a bad thing in itself. It certainly does us good to know history and be able to understand how it came about. But an over-fascination of WHO instead of WHY is not a good thing.
I would rather that we focus on what was discovered instead of who discovered it, and going in depth into their lives, worrying about the moral status, ect. It is good to know a certain amount of this information, so as to shed light on the discovery itself, but too much of that dilutes the important matter, What Was Discovered.
I think a public shift in this view would create a much less shark-filled society where people are anxious to be recognized. *Shrug* I guess I am just more of a sociologist than a humanist.
As far as early GUIs go, does anybody happen to remember a program called Frameworks? I really do not recall much of what it was, as I was just a child when we had it on our IBM "portable" with a 4 inch screen:)
As I recall, it was a GUI in the respect that it created frames around windows using ASCII characters. It represented drives and folders along the right side of the screen. It was probably based on XEROX, I don't know.
I don't think that it actually had the ability to run programs, as in multitasking or task switching. You could essentially view your drive contents, and use built-in programs to manipulate them. It had a word processor, spreadsheet program, calculators, ect.
Only thing I really remember is that it had alot of documentation. I tried to look it up on the internet but it seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.
The CD is not arranged in this manner: Ink Label Plastic Metal Plastic
That would actually be a pretty good design, and well protected. However it is actually like this: Ink Label/Metal Plastic
So, you can scratch the bottom plastic layer very deeply before it becomes a problem. But if you so much as lightly dink the other side, you'll have a completely unfixable mess because the Ink/Metal side is the actual data layer. I find it interesting that most people take special care to keep the plastic side safe, when actually the most vulnerable and dangerous side is the label side. Try it out with an old CD. Take a sharp instrument and scrape the label, then turn the CD over, you'll see it is permamently damaged.
The problem, the way I see it from experience with mergers and buy-offs. Is the company who is performing the aquisition bought them for a reason You don't just through away money, not when you are in the highly competitive technology world. They have reasons for purchasing, and what are those reasons. Those are what concern me. It may not even show up for a few years, who knows.
I don't like to come across as a paranoid, so I am not going to state this in such a way as to say that the situation I went through is what you will go through. I just want to make it clear how things work in most cases.
I had been working with a small digital media company for about two years. Around the end of my second year we were bought up by a larger entity. Initially we took it rather bad. We liked being a small seperate company with our own independant goals and longterm goals. Now that we were part of a larger organization, we lost those goals.
They sent out a rep. In fact he was the one in charge of aquiring us. To tell us that things were not going to change. Our mission would not collide with their mission. It was not their intent to change that in any foreseable future. It sounded nice, it sounded like we would now have the extra fund backing to do some of the things we had always wanted to do.
Later on, I found out the rest of the story. I found out that their plan in two years was to dissolve our newly coined "branch" and move us to another entity entirely. Kinda like a payoff they had been needing to pay with this other organization. So in short, their plan was to use our talent and equipment in the short term for their immediate plans, and when those plans ended, dissolve us and sell us off to another organization that they owed. At that point we would lose all of our goals.
They are going to tell you things like that. They will tell you that things will keep going indefinatly the way they are. Why? Because they bought you for a reason. They bought you for their purposes. The last thing they want is a big walk-out and losing all of their staff that they just purchased.
But don't ever think they won't try and change you eventually.
As I said at first. I am not necessarily saying that VA Research is guilty of what happened to my company. (I left by the way when I found the full story). They might have the best intentions. It just struck me when I heard Larry's explaination to you, and how it was practically word-for-word what I got out of our representative.
I would make a slight change to what Mr. Katz defines as a 'geek'.
An individual, who, of higher than average creative ability has alienated him or herself from the social machine, and devoted themselves to a practice that is in its nature introverted.
This leaves the hype-technology aspect behind. I don't feel that being technologically inclined should be an inclusion statement. Sure, in today's culture and society it is the most prevolant, but it is not the only way, nor was it ever the only way.
It is completely possible for a person, who like a computer-geek, has alienated themselves and dived into something such as writing esoteric philosophical fiction, to be a geek as well.
I have another small issue with auto-alienation and self-alienation. It is my belief that the geek is the one in control of that situation to a larger extent that John Katz seems to protray. Some people are brought up in an environment that causes them to be less socially apt than others. At some point in their life they choose to alienate themselves, even if unconciously.
It is not popular to say this, because a lot of us have gone through a lot of pain in our early years with hazing and alienation. It isn't easy to look at yourself and say, "Hey, maybe I was the one at fault." I'm not about to say that the insenstive folks who reigned their terror in highschool are off clean either. What I am saying is that it was a choice, most likely an unconcious choice, to alienate yourself. I know, because that is precisely what I did, unconsciously. I have seen plenty of intelligent, and by the worlds standards, unattractive individuals do just fine in the social arena. There is more to it than just that.
Also, I am not saying it is necessarily a Bad choice for a person to make. I know in my case, I am glad that I am who I am. I am glad that I can be the person that people call on when they need help with a technical matter. I enjoy exploring the depths of computers and I wouldn't have it any other way. The "social" life to me is dull compared to the technological life.
I just have a problem with people saying it was all their fault for making me this way. Own up to the fact that you made that decision, and you enjoy it, and now you are happy with it. A lot of those others arn't happy with themselves right now.
I do agree whole-heartedly with what he says overall though. Be happy with yourself. Understand that you are an important and integral part of this society, even if you chose to recluse yourself socially. Be confident in your choice. Most of us are, it is always nice to hear another "geek" saying it though.
I understand that backwards compatability is an important thing when you are making little-step enhancements to computing. But what we are talking about here is a level -far- beyond what we can do with current technology. None of our existing software is going to be running on these computers. They wouldn't know how to address the system without a massive amount of emulation layering anyway, so if you really were hellbent on doing that, you might as well emulate it down to binary while you are at it. You have to take the leap at some point, or you stagnate. From what I can tell, we are looking at a technology that could give us a virtual analogue system. The benefits of that are endless. Absolutely endless.
What I find interesting is that the it seems they are still driving to create a binary system. At least, that is what the media is protraying. Perhaps the research going on is a bit more open minded. It would seem to me that technology such as this would allow us to leap beyond the on/off limitations that we have now. There has been a few efforts to create a trinary system. I believe a research facility in Canada is working on something along those lines.
The problem with anything much more than binary is that you'd have to drastically increase the voltage to get any sort of differentiation between different voltage states, or you would have to delay the reactor to wait until the initial spike levels out, which would defeat any speed enhancement +binary would give you.
It would seem to me that these "nanotechnology" advancements would give us a much more refined control, a much more liberal control, over what is going on electrically, and allow a vast amount of <i>states</i> that the relay could be set at.
Are there any nanotech/quantum/electric buffs out there who could add a little reality insight to this theory? I do not know enough about it to really go beyond wondering.
Actually that has already be done to some extent. In #linux on dal.net they have a FAQ bot that spews out information when it is addressed. It doesn't have any intelligence to my knowledge though. I think it is simply a search engine of sorts. It is darn useful though for newbies because the channel members don't have to bother with the really routine questions.
I am not sure about the current *.tar.gz distributions of Megahal, but I do know that the Debian package contains a nice little perl script. If you have the::IRC module installed, then you can interface Megahal onto any IRC server/channel you wish. It will basically lurk there unless directly spoken to. Then it will either generate a reply in the channel or in a private/msg depending on a pre-defined average setting in the script.
I parked it in four channels for about 2 months. #christian.debate #net.goth #linux and #teen
I got some rather amusing results! The brain file ended up being somewhere around 16 megabytes in size. I was actually surprised with how well it would do. It would fake the average chatter for about 4 to 5 minutes, then they would just think it was a crackpot and ignore it. Some actually figured out it was a bot. Most just thought it was a crackpot. It ended up offending a lot of christians as it garbled messages about boot loaders, sex, and Jesus Christ into one paragraph. I got many laughs out of that experiement.
Themeing is available with out an extention in MacOS 8.5 and 8.6
True, but Apple very quickly dropped support for that. Those four themes are the only ones that exist because it is a closed system to the best of my knowledge. Apple paniced when they saw that it could be utilized to change the appearance of the OS and pulled the rug under everybodies feet on that one.
And ProgramSwitcher is a standard extention in MacOS 8.5-8.6
The ProgramSwitcher I am talking about is a shareware utility by that name, and it is far more powerful than the little hack put into OS8.5/6. The built in switcher is inane at best, you can't toggle to the next application, you have to sort through all the apps to get to what you want. The shareware program pops up a dialog ala Windows95/8 and lets you scroll through the list of apps before you select it. You can also quit apps while holding down the scrolling keys. You can redefine the keys. You can set up a plethora of window option hotkeys. Such as 'Bring Finder to the front and hide others' or 'Hide all other programs' or 'Show all programs' Once you use those features you will never go back to the vanilla OS.
And ProgramSwitcher is a standard extention in MacOS 8.5-8.6,
This is no more difficult than weeding through piles of extensions after the install, and no more newbie un-friendly. You can still wind up with an unusable system pretty easily.
One other note, just about every blue/white and iMac that I have ever seen has had a USB floppy hooked up to it. Yes yes, I know, you don't use one yourself. As I said, just about every. I did not say all. But a good 80%. Why make something an option that 80% of your customers are going to have to purchase? Go do the math.
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Actually, I was thinking about it, and if you used hundreds of those double 1x1 ended flexible tubes in an interlocking pattern, you could probably create a comfortable chair.
I think that you would find that the most difficult part of rendering an image with Lego would be color depth. Lego only come in a small range of colors, all very heavily saturated.
The only way you could conceivably do any dithering would be to use a scale so large that you could effectively mix the colors and confuse the eye with an optical illusion. You wouldn't be able to do that on the surface of a desk.
Your best bet would be to create, like he said on the site, a company logo or something similiar. Those tend to be mostly monochromatic (so that they can be used on a wide variety of applications, from brochures to embossed paper weights) and would allow easy transferance to Lego design.
One other thing. Lego does provide a number of differently colored bricks now, some that are transparent too. You could use the colored transparent bricks with a different color behind it to get a bit of a mix. The only problem with this is that these newer special color bricks are much MUCH more expensive and hard to get in quantity. The bricks you can get in quantity are your basic blue, red, yellow, green (not as common), white, and black.
You wish to see what images look like with those limitations? Remember CGA moniters? :)
Ummm
/procs. It is a different philosophy, just like using X is a different philosophy from those 'other' GUIS. Since it is slapped on top of a true multi-tasker, you tend to place all of your small concise applications side by side instead of stacking monotlithic monsters on top of each other since you can't use them all at once anyway.
df -h | lpr
I think that is what you are looking for. That'll print out freespace on all mounted disks in 'human readable' format.
I think the problem is you are used to the DOS environment where you must rely almost entirely upon the command line to do things. There are tons of tools on the *NIX side that do these things for you.
For instance, piping to 'sort' to tabulate any output, using 'sed' to format the output before printing using 'cat' to monitor
Those are the two things I see most people struggle with when migrating from mac/dos/win to linux. The need for a new philosophy both on the command line, and in X.
I was talking about the pads with arrow keys alone. The ones with mini-joysticks are better, but still not good. The mini-joysticks are too small and provide much less of a tactile feedback than mouse movement.
The same thing goes for standard joysticks on the PC. You won't find many good FPS players using a joystick. Why? You have full analog build-up sure! But you are still stuck with the upper-limit.
Technically a mouse DOES have an upper limit, but in practice you'll never find it. You'd have to move your hand faster than is humanly possible.
Obviously then, there is a much wider range of precision, and this precision is guided by a very menmonic -- the faster you move the faster the character moves -- feel. Sliding a joystick toggle over until it hits the edge and maxes out, really doesn't do this.
Indeed, there are merits to have the resolution set lower to provide greater accuracy. Don't underestimate the macro features built into most PC FPS games. My setup had two macros made, I bound them to the wheel on the mouse.
The macros basically did three things. If you pull the wheel towards you, it set the sensitivity to a low level, tells you that it did so, and binds two new macros to the mouse wheel. The two new ones are the next stage of settings. So in other words if you pull the wheel towards you again it will execute a macro that makes the mouse even slower, ect.
What is this good for? Take the TF Sniper, 3 clicks up...high sensativity 'dual mode'...run to an opening...4 clicks down...ultra-high precision...BAM...4 clicks up and run to a new spot.
You get the necessary sniper/railgun accuracy plus the high powered speed you need to dual. You have to get used to the sensativity shifting all of the time, that is a little weird at first.
Think about it this way. You turn mouse-look on which is practically a default in games now. This means you move the mouse to physically turn your viewpoint and angle of vision. With one calculated move you can spin your character 180 degrees around and 40 degrees down.
Most expert FPS players set their mouse resolution insanely high so that the slightest twitch moves the character quickly. This means minimal movement, a fraction of an inch, to accomplish gymnastic moves you simply CANNOT do with a device that provides upper-limit movement like arrow pads on consoles and arrow keys on keyboards. They both provide no analog feel to movement. You are either turning or you arn't. No fast turns, no slow turns except by controlled tapping which decreases your accuracy.
That is just mouse movement. I set up my keyboard bindings to provide compass movement. N S E W. There is no turning with the keyboard that is all handled with the mouse.
If you have dual input movement you can accomplish such feats as circle strafing, attacking your opponent while he is chasing you, midair snipes, ect.
You can always tell a one-input movement player because they can't effectively circle strafe. In other words, you can circle around them, always pointed at them, and fire at them. If you are fighting somebody that is using a gamepad or keyboard input only you can stay behind them and they can't do a thing about it.
The other advantages were brought up in another message. I have a five button mouse (wheel counts as three) I bind macros to the wheel such as firing off one missile and returning to the previous weapon. You can't even make or bind macros with a console.
On the keyboard I don't use the default 1-9 numbers for weapon selection. That is too slow because it requires moving my hand from the movement keys. So, I've bound three keys around the movement area for weapon macros that alternate between similiar weapons (nail gun, shot gun - supernail gun, double barrel - grenade launcher, rocket launcher) ect.
Everything else I need is bound right within that district so I never move my hands.
You simply cannot do this stuff with a console.
I had a friend that swore by keyboard input alone. He wouldn't use a mouse because it was too weird. He was a GOOD player with just the keyboard, but there were obvious limitations to what he could do. I finally converted him to dual input and he became one of the best Quake players I've ever seen.
A good point on the surface.
However there are serious interface issues around taking away the keyboard input entirely. If the eventual outcome is to take it away you will seriously hurt the usability of these programs. Expecially Photoshop and their ilk.
Consider the fact that people who use these programs for their career, it would be important to note that these users do not waste their time with palettes and menus unless there is no other option.
When I use photoshop, I use it in full screen mode with all of the palettes off. I can switch layers, apply effects, change brushes, sizes, pressure, everything with one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse. It would take 10 times longer to do everything with a stylus because it would be completely dependent on a point-and-tap interface.
Such usage is fine for the intermediate to beginning users who don't NEED to spend all of their time in these applications. For those who rely on them to bring in their paychecks, speed is everything, and the keyboard mappings mean speed. I used Photoshop as an example, which is ironic because incidentally it is the worst 'commercial standard' when it comes to keyboard support. Other programs are much more reliant on keyboard input and commands. Some can be completely reconfigured to accomdate any users needs.
Another point is that this really isn't about graphics and design users either. The way I understand it, this will be applied to portable solutions. You'll be hard pressed to find a designer that uses a laptop instead of a desktop workstation with a 21" screen.
The fact of the matter is this will be going onto portables for casual to professional users of conventional software SUCH AS word processing SUCH AS email. I don't know about you, but I can type at around 100 WPM on a good keyboard. I can write about 1/3 of that on a sheet of paper.
Paper provides a tactile feel, and allows small strokes. Stylus typically has a smooth surface with no give, and requires large strokes to be recognized. This will slow that down to a crawl.
This idea has cropped up in the past, and it has never flown exactly because of the reasons I gave above. For the 'power users' they need their keyboard mappings. For the casual users, they can still type faster than they can write.
The one thing I do like about the stylus design is that you have an instant point-to-hit instead of a mouse or trackball where you must move-to-hit. That speeds up pointer-operations, but it tends to tire out your arm, expecially on a large enough stylus. What could be a 1 inch flick of the mouse, or a small twitch on a trackball means a huge 8-10" arm movement to reach the interface widget you are trying to hit.
I don't see it flying, ever.
Interesting, I thought the Bible pushed the whole "unto the seventh generation they shall be punished." quite readily.
What's happened to you Sam? Records is a dead-end department. Information Retrieval is where it is at. And just look at this suit you are wearing, you'll never get anywhere in a suit like that. I'm perfectly happy where I'm at Jack. Don't you have any dreams Sam? Dreams? No, I don't have any dreams. I don't want anything Jack. SaaaaaAAAaaammmmmmm.
They would quickly amass a large quanity of these containers, floating around in orbit. It would take too long to get a program together to collect them and do something constructive with them. There is no feasible way to get them back to earth, and in the meantime they would really clutter up the orbit.
Not only that, but you are confusing the fact that what NASA does has nothing to do with what Collective Human Stupidity is capabile of doing. A small group of humans can be quite rational about the preservation of our ecosystem, and the checks and balances there. But collective humanity as a whole is quite greedy and not really ready to think on the long term scale yet. Sad but true.
I am not saying that such a fascination is a bad thing in itself. It certainly does us good to know history and be able to understand how it came about. But an over-fascination of WHO instead of WHY is not a good thing.
I would rather that we focus on what was discovered instead of who discovered it, and going in depth into their lives, worrying about the moral status, ect. It is good to know a certain amount of this information, so as to shed light on the discovery itself, but too much of that dilutes the important matter, What Was Discovered.
I think a public shift in this view would create a much less shark-filled society where people are anxious to be recognized. *Shrug* I guess I am just more of a sociologist than a humanist.
As I recall, it was a GUI in the respect that it created frames around windows using ASCII characters. It represented drives and folders along the right side of the screen. It was probably based on XEROX, I don't know.
I don't think that it actually had the ability to run programs, as in multitasking or task switching. You could essentially view your drive contents, and use built-in programs to manipulate them. It had a word processor, spreadsheet program, calculators, ect.
Only thing I really remember is that it had alot of documentation. I tried to look it up on the internet but it seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.
The CD is not arranged in this manner:
Ink Label
Plastic
Metal
Plastic
That would actually be a pretty good design, and well protected. However it is actually like this:
Ink Label/Metal
Plastic
So, you can scratch the bottom plastic layer very deeply before it becomes a problem. But if you so much as lightly dink the other side, you'll have a completely unfixable mess because the Ink/Metal side is the actual data layer. I find it interesting that most people take special care to keep the plastic side safe, when actually the most vulnerable and dangerous side is the label side. Try it out with an old CD. Take a sharp instrument and scrape the label, then turn the CD over, you'll see it is permamently damaged.
The problem, the way I see it from experience with mergers and buy-offs. Is the company who is performing the aquisition bought them for a reason You don't just through away money, not when you are in the highly competitive technology world. They have reasons for purchasing, and what are those reasons. Those are what concern me. It may not even show up for a few years, who knows.
I had been working with a small digital media company for about two years. Around the end of my second year we were bought up by a larger entity. Initially we took it rather bad. We liked being a small seperate company with our own independant goals and longterm goals. Now that we were part of a larger organization, we lost those goals.
They sent out a rep. In fact he was the one in charge of aquiring us. To tell us that things were not going to change. Our mission would not collide with their mission. It was not their intent to change that in any foreseable future. It sounded nice, it sounded like we would now have the extra fund backing to do some of the things we had always wanted to do.
Later on, I found out the rest of the story. I found out that their plan in two years was to dissolve our newly coined "branch" and move us to another entity entirely. Kinda like a payoff they had been needing to pay with this other organization. So in short, their plan was to use our talent and equipment in the short term for their immediate plans, and when those plans ended, dissolve us and sell us off to another organization that they owed. At that point we would lose all of our goals.
They are going to tell you things like that. They will tell you that things will keep going indefinatly the way they are. Why? Because they bought you for a reason. They bought you for their purposes. The last thing they want is a big walk-out and losing all of their staff that they just purchased.
But don't ever think they won't try and change you eventually.
As I said at first. I am not necessarily saying that VA Research is guilty of what happened to my company. (I left by the way when I found the full story). They might have the best intentions. It just struck me when I heard Larry's explaination to you, and how it was practically word-for-word what I got out of our representative.
This leaves the hype-technology aspect behind. I don't feel that being technologically inclined should be an inclusion statement. Sure, in today's culture and society it is the most prevolant, but it is not the only way, nor was it ever the only way.
It is completely possible for a person, who like a computer-geek, has alienated themselves and dived into something such as writing esoteric philosophical fiction, to be a geek as well.
I have another small issue with auto-alienation and self-alienation. It is my belief that the geek is the one in control of that situation to a larger extent that John Katz seems to protray. Some people are brought up in an environment that causes them to be less socially apt than others. At some point in their life they choose to alienate themselves, even if unconciously.
It is not popular to say this, because a lot of us have gone through a lot of pain in our early years with hazing and alienation. It isn't easy to look at yourself and say, "Hey, maybe I was the one at fault." I'm not about to say that the insenstive folks who reigned their terror in highschool are off clean either. What I am saying is that it was a choice, most likely an unconcious choice, to alienate yourself. I know, because that is precisely what I did, unconsciously. I have seen plenty of intelligent, and by the worlds standards, unattractive individuals do just fine in the social arena. There is more to it than just that.
Also, I am not saying it is necessarily a Bad choice for a person to make. I know in my case, I am glad that I am who I am. I am glad that I can be the person that people call on when they need help with a technical matter. I enjoy exploring the depths of computers and I wouldn't have it any other way. The "social" life to me is dull compared to the technological life.
I just have a problem with people saying it was all their fault for making me this way. Own up to the fact that you made that decision, and you enjoy it, and now you are happy with it. A lot of those others arn't happy with themselves right now.
I do agree whole-heartedly with what he says overall though. Be happy with yourself. Understand that you are an important and integral part of this society, even if you chose to recluse yourself socially. Be confident in your choice. Most of us are, it is always nice to hear another "geek" saying it though.
I understand that backwards compatability is an important thing when you are making little-step enhancements to computing. But what we are talking about here is a level -far- beyond what we can do with current technology. None of our existing software is going to be running on these computers. They wouldn't know how to address the system without a massive amount of emulation layering anyway, so if you really were hellbent on doing that, you might as well emulate it down to binary while you are at it. You have to take the leap at some point, or you stagnate. From what I can tell, we are looking at a technology that could give us a virtual analogue system. The benefits of that are endless. Absolutely endless.
Dropped my tags for some reason, sorry about that. :)
What I find interesting is that the it seems they are still driving to create a binary system. At least, that is what the media is protraying. Perhaps the research going on is a bit more open minded. It would seem to me that technology such as this would allow us to leap beyond the on/off limitations that we have now. There has been a few efforts to create a trinary system. I believe a research facility in Canada is working on something along those lines.
The problem with anything much more than binary is that you'd have to drastically increase the voltage to get any sort of differentiation between different voltage states, or you would have to delay the reactor to wait until the initial spike levels out, which would defeat any speed enhancement +binary would give you.
It would seem to me that these "nanotechnology" advancements would give us a much more refined control, a much more liberal control, over what is going on electrically, and allow a vast amount of <i>states</i> that the relay could be set at.
Are there any nanotech/quantum/electric buffs out there who could add a little reality insight to this theory? I do not know enough about it to really go beyond wondering.
Actually that has already be done to some extent. In #linux on dal.net they have a FAQ bot that spews out information when it is addressed. It doesn't have any intelligence to my knowledge though. I think it is simply a search engine of sorts. It is darn useful though for newbies because the channel members don't have to bother with the really routine questions.
I am not sure about the current *.tar.gz distributions of Megahal, but I do know that the Debian package contains a nice little perl script. If you have the ::IRC module installed, then you can interface Megahal onto any IRC server/channel you wish. It will basically lurk there unless directly spoken to. Then it will either generate a reply in the channel or in a private /msg depending on a pre-defined average setting in the script.
I parked it in four channels for about 2 months. #christian.debate #net.goth #linux and #teen
I got some rather amusing results! The brain file ended up being somewhere around 16 megabytes in size. I was actually surprised with how well it would do. It would fake the average chatter for about 4 to 5 minutes, then they would just think it was a crackpot and ignore it. Some actually figured out it was a bot. Most just thought it was a crackpot. It ended up offending a lot of christians as it garbled messages about boot loaders, sex, and Jesus Christ into one paragraph. I got many laughs out of that experiement.
True, but I suggest you go back and read a little Einstein. That is the whole concept, the velocity of light is a constant.
Special Relativity.
Themeing is available with out an extention in MacOS 8.5 and 8.6
True, but Apple very quickly dropped support for that. Those four themes are the only ones that exist because it is a closed system to the best of my knowledge. Apple paniced when they saw that it could be utilized to change the appearance of the OS and pulled the rug under everybodies feet on that one.
And ProgramSwitcher is a standard extention in MacOS 8.5-8.6
The ProgramSwitcher I am talking about is a shareware utility by that name, and it is far more powerful than the little hack put into OS8.5/6. The built in switcher is inane at best, you can't toggle to the next application, you have to sort through all the apps to get to what you want. The shareware program pops up a dialog ala Windows95/8 and lets you scroll through the list of apps before you select it. You can also quit apps while holding down the scrolling keys. You can redefine the keys. You can set up a plethora of window option hotkeys. Such as 'Bring Finder to the front and hide others' or 'Hide all other programs' or 'Show all programs' Once you use those features you will never go back to the vanilla OS.
And ProgramSwitcher is a standard extention in MacOS 8.5-8.6,
This is no more difficult than weeding through piles of extensions after the install, and no more newbie un-friendly. You can still wind up with an unusable system pretty easily.
One other note, just about every blue/white and iMac that I have ever seen has had a USB floppy hooked up to it. Yes yes, I know, you don't use one yourself. As I said, just about every. I did not say all. But a good 80%. Why make something an option that 80% of your customers are going to have to purchase? Go do the math.